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Alabama corrections officers' ranks drop 20 percent

Former corrections officer Jonathan Truitt at his home in Leeds, Ala., on Tuesday December 27, 2016.(Photo: Mickey Welsh / Advertiser)

The frustrations piled up long before Jonathan Truitt ended his career as a corrections officer.

A sergeant at St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville, Truitt started at Holman Correctional Facility in 2008. He had been working in a sawmill and worked out with several correctional officers at a local YMCA, who mentioned the department was hiring. With the economy starting to slip into recession, it seemed like a good move. After more than three years at Holman, Truitt won a promotion to St. Clair in 2012.

The work at the prison -- notorious for its violence -- grew harder and harder. There were long shifts lasting up to 16 hours. Searches of cell blocks could yield “30 to 40 knives” in a cell block with 24 cells. The equipment COs had, Truitt said, was subpar: Pepper spray cans might be half full, and radios might lack decent batteries or chargers.

Keeping order, Truitt said, became ever more difficult. Inmates, he said, were “being assaulted in every way imaginable,” Truitt said in a recent interview, saying it could "take days if not weeks" to identify the guilty parties, "if we did find out." Contraband in the prison, he said, "is out of control."

"We don’t have the officers to get the contraband," he said. "When we go into the blocks to search, we would be met with resistance from inmates.”

But it was an incident at Truitt's old prison that led him to step away. In September, Officer Kenneth Bettis, an Iraq War veteran who Truitt worked with at Holman, was stabbed by an inmate; according to the Alabama Department of Corrections, the inmate attacked Bettis for denying him an extra plate of food. Bettis died of injuries two weeks later.

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Former corrections officer Jonathan Truitt at his home in Leeds, Ala., on Tuesday December 27, 2016.(Photo: Mickey Welsh / Advertiser)

At that point, Truitt said, he thought about the costs to his family should he be killed in the line of duty. He resigned last month.

Corrections officer J. Spears walks through the sleeping are for inmates coming through intake at Kilby Corrections Facility in Montgomery, Ala., on Friday, Sept. 4, 2015. The facility is currently at 301 percent it's intended capacity. Kilby is currently housing 1,448 inmates and was designed for 440.(Photo: Albert Cesare / Advertiser)

Many other corrections officers have also decided to step away. According to ADOC records, the number of COs assigned to state prisons fell from 2,042 in September 2015 to 1,627 this past September, a 20 percent drop in the workforce. Not only did that drop come on top of a long-term decline in the number of COs in the prisons -- there were 2,342 officers assigned to Alabama correctional facilities in September 2011 -- it exceeded it, a fact department officials are very aware of.

“We saw the most significant dip in one year than in the past five years,” Alabama Department of Corrections Commissioner Jeff Dunn said in a recent interview.

Systemwide, the state’s prisons had just 45.6 percent of their authorized officers working in the prisons in September. Four medium-security facilities – Bibb, Easterling, Fountain/J.O. Davis and Ventress – had less than a third of their authorized officers working in the facilities.

Turnover in correction officer ranks is not unusual, but staffing issues are becoming more acute because the number of people applying to be corrections officers is falling. According to Dunn, about 100 officers graduated from their academy in 2016. “In years prior to that, that number was 200, 250,” he said. An academy class currently underway “only has roughly 25 officers in it, when the norm we would like to see is 70.”

“I think the public has become very aware of the conditions inside our facilities, and that gives people pause,” Dunn said. The decline in CO ranks has come amid an increase in violence. Total year-to-date assaults went up from 1,362 reported incidents in September 2015 to 1,764 in September 2016, an increase of 29.5 percent. Reported assaults on staff—including assaults with serious injury and those involving thrown substances – increased from 465 in September 2015 to 521 in September 2016, a jump of 12 percent.

Eric Wynn, released from St. Clair on Aug. 29 after serving 10 years in various state prisons on drug charges, called the facility “extremely dangerous.”

Alabama prison locations(Photo: Kent Travis/USA Today Network)

“It was like a jungle,” he said. “If you weren’t strong enough or didn’t carry a knife, your property got taken.”

At St. Clair, reported year-to-date assaults increased from 157 in September 2015 to 249 in September 2016, a 58.5 percent increase, though an ADOC intervention in the prison last spring helped reduce monthly assaults down through September. Still, Charlotte Morrison, an attorney with the Montgomery-based Equal Justice Initiative, which has sued the state over prison conditions, said “knives are ubiquitous” at St. Clair.

“People go for hours without seeing a correctional officer,” she said. “We have staff report they have trouble seeing a correctional officer. This is a really dangerous environment.”

There’s broad agreement that the conditions of the prisons contribute to the decline. Low pay does as well: A corrections officer trainee starts making $28,516.80 a year, compared to $35,589.60 for a state trooper trainee. Dunn says he will include money for a pay raise in his 2018 budget request, though the department was still working on the details of proposal last month. The corrections budget — and any adjustment in pay — will need to be approved by the Alabama Legislature. Dunn and Gov. Robert Bentley will also renew a campaign to replace most of the state’s prisons with four new facilities, which they say will improve safety for staff and inmates in the facilities.

Truitt and Randall McGilberry, president of the Alabama Corrections Officer Association, which lobbies for corrections officers, agree that the conditions are a problem but also say that corrections officers are suffering from what they call a lack of leadership within the prison system.

“(COs) are leaving their chosen careers and making more money doing something else, and in a much safer situation,” McGilberry said. “It’s really the management. There’s just total incompetence in the management right now.”

Sen. Cam Ward, R-Alabaster, who sponsored a major prison reform bill in 2015, said “morale is at an all-time low” for corrections officers.

“It’s the most dangerous law enforcement job in the state, but they’re paid the least,” he said.

Populations decline; assaults don’t

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A corrections officer walks through the faith dormitory at Kilby Corrections Facility in Montgomery, Ala., on Friday, Sept. 4, 2015. The facility is currently at 301 percent it's intended capacity. Kilby is currently housing 1,448 inmates and was designed for 440.(Photo: Albert Cesare / Advertiser)

The thinning CO ranks appear to be offsetting a notable decrease in the state’s inmate population. There were 23,328 prisoners in Alabama’s correctional facilities in September, a drop of about 3.6 percent over the previous year.

Overcrowding still remains high. Alabama's prisons were built to hold 13,318 inmates, and the drop brought the system’s total capacity down from 181 percent to 175 percent – an improvement, but still among the highest in the nation, and one that has brought lawsuits that could force many remedies, including new construction or the release of inmates. But the fall continues a slow but steady trend: Over the last five years, the total population in state prisons has fallen by 2,000 inmates.

Officials attribute this year’s decline to reforms to presumptive sentencing guidelines approved in 2013, and the 2015 prison bill, which reclassified some offenses and made new investments in parole and probation with a goal of reducing recidivism.

“We anticipate over the next three to four years, we’ll see upwards of maybe a 6, 8, or 10 percent decrease in our inmate population,” Dunn said. “That’s not to say that we don’t think we ought to continue to work for criminal justice reform and sentencing reform. We think there’s still areas that need to be discussed. But these are encouraging signs.”

The drop has in some cases allowed the department to redeploy staffers. At Holman, where overcrowding fell from 140 percent to 134 percent between September 2015 and September 2016, the department combined two small facilities at the prison, allowing them to “shift a significant portion of that staff into Holman,” according to Dunn.

But the loss of corrections officers has driven inmate-to-CO ratios up throughout the system. There were 11.8 inmates for every corrections officer in September 2015, according to ADOC numbers; that increased to 13.4 inmates for every corrections officer this past September. In Bibb, Easterling and Fountain correctional facilities, the ratio exceeded 20 inmates for every one corrections officer.

That means long hours for the officers who work in the facilities.

“They don’t have proper equipment, (and) they work tons of overtime,” said McGilberry. “If something did break out, a lot of guys would be so fatigued they wouldn’t be able to respond properly.”

In an email, Bob Horton, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections, said some officers at St. Clair had expressed concerns with equipment issues. "In the past 12 months, the warden has taken steps to ensure each officer is properly equipped and a sufficient supply of required security items are on-hand and accessible for each shift," Horton wrote.

Fewer officers also mean fewer disciplinary write-ups; the system saw year-to-date disciplinary write-ups fall 10 percent from September 2015 to September 2016, with major disciplinaries down 11 percent as assaults climbed.

“Could we say if one more officer or two more officers could have prevented (the riots)?” Dunn said. “I don’t think we can say that definitively. But I know if we’d had 20 officers there, we’d have a different dynamic in the prison.”

Intervention

St. Clair Correctional Facility in Springville has a troubled history of violence.(Photo: Alabama Department of Corrections)

St. Clair Correctional Facility often acts as a convex lens for the problems plaguing Alabama's prison system. Six inmates were killed in the facility between 2011 and 2014, and a riot erupted at the prison in 2015 that left a correctional officer and 15 inmates injured. An inmate stabbed a correctional officer in the prison last March.

Wynn said inmates could “sleep where you wanted to sleep” and said “police feared for their lives, feared for their safety.”

“Everybody was living in a world without police,” he said. “Imagine living in a world without police officers.”

The problems were attributed in part to a lack of working locks in the prison. ADOC is conducting a replacement of doors and locks at St. Clair that Dunn says will be complete in February. Truitt alleged that inmates at St. Clair have sabotaged some of the new locks and doors; Horton said in an email there were "no reports of significant issues" with the new locks.

The attack on the officer, combined with rising violence in the prison, led the ADOC to deploy its Corrections Emergency Response Team (CERT) to St. Clair; recruit volunteers from other prisons to work in the facility and hire new staff to work control cubicles. Unlike officers, those new staffers do not have Alabama Peace Officers Standards and Training (APOST) certification, but their presence “allows additional bodies on the floor,” Dunn said

The department also capped the number of inmates in the facility and began transferring inmates out of St. Clair and to other close security prisons.

As a result, St. Clair finds itself an unusual situation for an Alabama state prison: It operated below its designed capacity from July through September. And those moves seem to have had an effect: Monthly assault numbers fell from a high of 33 in May to 17 in September.

Dunn, however, said the St. Clair intervention was only a temporary solution.

“This is very much robbing Peter to pay Paul,” he said. “The additional augmentation staff has to come from somewhere. That’s not a long-term strategy for success.”

Truitt said the CERT officers helped for a time.

“Inmates saw the CERT team, the riot team and thought ‘Hey, we better behave’ because they had special equipment to handle it,” he said. But he said the CERT team was most effective at night and that “most illegal acts took place during the day.”

Morrison said St. Clair is “still in an emergency situation.”

“Staff and inmates, the men there are afraid,” she said.

Construction

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Jeff Dunn, Commissioner of the Alabama Department of Corrections, speaks to members of the media while giving a tour of Kilby Corrections Facility in Montgomery, Ala., on Friday, Sept. 4, 2015. The facility is currently at 301 percent it's intended capacity. Kilby is currently housing 1,448 inmates and was designed for 440.(Photo: Albert Cesare / Advertiser)

The department has increased its budget for recruiting and hopes a pay raise for COs will help. But Dunn and Bentley will also press forward with their prison construction proposal. Bentley said recently he may call a special session within the 2017 regular session of the Legislature, which starts in February, to address the issue.

Dunn said the proposal will resemble what the department proposed last year. It will include three 4,000-bed men’s prisons – which, he said, will contain smaller facilities holding about 500 inmates each, with all sharing services for food, clothing, laundry and medical care.

Corrections experts, noting that recent trends in prison construction emphasize smaller facilities, questioned the scale of what the department proposed last year. The plan foundered amid questions over the $800 million cost and the method of bidding proposed.

Dunn said the plan embraces a small approach in a larger context, and acknowledges the “fiscal reality” that building six separate facilities as opposed to one larger one might be more expensive.

“We’re going to be able to provide security and safety in a much better environment than we have now for staff, our correctional officers and inmates,” he said. “We’re going to be able to provide dramatically increased rehabilitation treatments, education, all those things as a department we want to do that promotes public safety, that increases inmates’ ability to be successful when they get out.”

Ward said there will be a strong push for the construction proposal, in part because of lawsuits over medical and mental health care of inmates in Alabama’s prisons.

“We’re working the votes pretty hard on it,” he said. “We’re going to pass some sort of construction bill, mainly because we’re under the gun from the federal court.”

Others are not so sure new prisons are the right answer, saying without proper leadership and a commitment to rehabilitative programming, the prisons’ problems will persist. The state built St. Clair, which opened in 1983, in response to the state’s prison crisis of the 1970s, which led to a federal takeover. Within a few years, Morrison said, “the facility was in disrepair.”

“Any prison, no matter how new it is, how sophisticated, the security mechanisms can fail,” she said. “We need real professional leadership and culture in place for any prison to operate.”

The department has not said where new prisons might go. Truitt said many officers he knew would be reluctant to travel to work at a new prison.

“The camps will be understaffed when they start, or they’re going to have non-experienced officers working them,” he said.

But Dunn says that when he presents his construction proposal to corrections officers, he gets a positive response.

“When we explain this vision to them, it’s something they can buy into and see would be very beneficial to their role as a corrections officer, to their ability to do their job, to the security, safety, the whole gambit,” he said.

Getting overcrowding under control would be a big part of that, and Dunn said “we’re not going to stop until we get numbers to 100 percent capacity.” But, he said, even with new prisons, that would “only be a start” toward addressing the problems.

“This is a long time in coming and it’s going to take a long, concerted effort to address all the associated issues,” he said.

Truitt plans to go back to college and finish a degree in education. He said he worked with good officers in the prisons and tried to help inmates “that were trying to better their lives and get out” by assisting them with GED classes or entry into trade schools.

Increasing pay; changing leadership; limiting overtime and improving benefits, he said, would allow officers to stay on the job. But the violence and the lack of support, he said, finally became too much for him.